When I returned to England in the middle of May, 1944, the guys in the squadron couldn't believe what they saw. Not only did they never expect to see me again, but I was twenty pounds heavier and brown as a hog in mud. I was the first evadee to make it back. "Yeager," Obie said, greeting me, "when are you gonna do things right? When you're shot down, you're supposed to stay down." My shoulders were peeling from the Spanish sun, while the guys were pale and skinny. Flying daily above the weather they got sunburn circles around their eyes-contoured around the outlines of their oxygen masks and flying helmets-and looked like a pack of damned raccoons. When I handed out a bunch of ripe bananas I brought back for them, man, they were speechless; they hadn't seen a banana since we left the States. That's how I got so fat, I told them, eating bananas in Spain while soaking up sunshine at a resort hotel. All expenses were paid by Uncle Sam, including civilian clothes, room, food, and booze. By the time I was finished, they couldn't wait to bail out over Spain.
Mostly, I was telling the truth. About Spain at least; I really didn't spend my time in France hidden out on the second floor of a whorehouse in Lyon. But I did have a room with a balcony in a resort hotel in Alma de Aragon, where there was nothing to do but sunbathe, eat, and flirt with the chambermaids for six weeks while the American consul tried to free six of us downed airmen from our hellish existence. Because of the war-which I heard about from time to time-the Franco government was short of gasoline, and that's how we were negotiated out: so many gallons of Texaco per evadee.
I was sent back to England to pack my bags: I was going home. No more combat. The regulations were strictly enforced to protect the underground in occupied countries who assisted Allied airmen. German intelligence kept dossiers on most of us and knew who had been shot down before; they'd go right to work on your fingernails if you were shot down again.
Of course you had to be crazy to want to stay and shiver at Leiston, which was three concrete runways surrounded by a sea of mud, and cold and clammy Nissen huts. The Eighth Air Force had stuck us where the sun never shines, sixty miles up the coast from London with only two miles of land between us and the gales blowing in from the North Sea. We huddled around coke stoves and shivered in sleeping bags. The locals in the nearby village of Yoxford resented having seven thousand Yanks descend upon them, their pubs, and their women, and were rude and nasty. Who would want to fight to stay in such a miserable place where you flew off every day to get your ass shot off, and existed mainly on beer and greasy fish and chips? Well, much to my surprise, I did.
In Spain, I looked forward to going home and marrying Glennis. But from the moment I arrived back at Leiston, I knew that this was where I belonged until I had done my share of the fighting. I felt like a bug-out artist. And the idea of sitting out the war as a damned flight instructor in Texas or somewhere tore me up. Guys like Bud Anderson and Don Bochkay were already double aces who completed their tours and then volunteered for more. I was raised to finish what I started, not slink off after flying only eight missions. Screw the regulations. And when I said as much to friends like O'Brien and Browning, they looked at me as if my brains had been boiled into oatmeal by the Spanish sun. Group put me in for the Bronze Star for helping Pat to make it over the Pyrenees, and my friends told me to take my medal and run. I was scheduled to fly to New York on June 25.
"No way," I said.
I sat alone in my room, staring at the empty bed across from mine, where a bare mattress was rolled, waiting for a new occupant. My roomie was gone; Mack McKee had been shot down over Germany a few weeks after I was. Mack and I had stuck together all the way, from Nevada on. We even shared the same eight decker bunks aboard the Queen Elizabeth and kept things interesting by sawing through the ropes holding those bunks, so when the top sleeper crawled in the sack, he broke through and started a chain reaction pileup that landed six others on top of the bottom sleeper. At Leiston, we outsmarted the gamekeepers and poached His Majesty's rabbits and pheasants in the nearby woods, frying them on our small coke stove. We bought a couple of wirehaired terriers from a kennel; I named mine Mustang, he named his Ace. The dogs were gone, because we both had our asses shot off, the guys thought they were jinxed. Mack was a bloody mess when he bailed out. He left one of his arms in the cockpit.
I told myself, "Well, that's war. That's how it is." But that wasn't much comfort. I felt like I had lost a close brother, which, in a way, I had. He had flown more than twenty missions and fought the good fight, which was a lot more than I could say for myself. Evadee rule or not, I figured the war had been cut out from under me before I could make worthwhile all those hard and expensive months of combat training. There wasn't a rule ever invented that couldn't be bent. So I marched on group headquarters and began my fight.
Without realizing it, I was about to take charge of my life and push it in a direction where everything that happened in later years was a logical outcome for a career fighter pilot who had compiled an outstanding combat record. If I had submitted to being sent home, I doubt whether the Army Air Corps would have been interested in retaining my services when the war ended. I would've been just another noncommissioned officer who had spent most of the war instructing young fighter pilots how to fly. Not very impressive. I would probably have been mustered out and my flying career abruptly ended. But I wasn't consciously thinking about my future; I was just being stubborn about the present. I knew the odds were stacked against me, but in the end events and luck came together for me, and one man-the only one who could-decided my fate: Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.
I was brassy and pushed my way up the chain of command at group headquarters, arguing my case. And because I was the first evadee to make it back, the majors and colonels I talked to were kinder than they might have been and helped me to keep climbing the ladder by allowing me to go to London and talk to the brass at Supreme Headquarters. Everyone I saw told me I couldn't stay, but the brass enjoyed meeting a very junior officer who refused to go home. "We'd like to help," I was told, "but the regulations won't allow it." While I was being passed around among colonels and generals at SHAPE, the Allies launched the invasion of Normandy on June 6, and the London newspapers reported that the French Maquis were now openly battling the Germans in the hedgerows of Normandy, behind the lines. "Well, there you go," I remember telling a colonel at SHAPE, "the Maquis are out in the open now, and there's no way I can blow them to the Gestapo if I were shot down again."
On June 11, I had an appointment with a two-star general and was joined by a bomber captain named Fred Glover, who had evaded back through Holland, and didn't want to be sent home, either. The general listened to our arguments, sighed, and finally told us that only General Eisenhower could decide the matter. "I think Ike would like to meet you two," the general said. "I'll see what I can do." He got us an appointment for eleven the next morning.
I woke up scared to death. My hotel room was shaking from a roaring putt putt putt, and I rushed to the window thinking I would see one of those German jet fighters I had heard about in trouble and about to crash over central London. Instead I saw a German V-1 buzz bomb directly overhead; even as I watched, the engine quit and the damned thing nosed over from fifteen hundred feet and began to fall. I hit the deck. There was a jarring explosion only a few blocks away. The first V-bomb attack on London had begun, and I figured that my appointment with Eisenhower would be canceled. But exactly at eleven Glover and I were saluting smartly in front of the Supreme Allied Commander's desk in his map-lined office.